


chiaroscuro

by ymirjotunn



Series: the post-game arc where everybody has a life-changing field trip with kamukura [2]
Category: Dangan Ronpa 3: The End of 希望ヶ峰学園 | The End of Kibougamine Gakuen | End of Hope's Peak High School, Super Dangan Ronpa 2
Genre: Cofronting, Gen, Nonbinary Character, Recovery, Schizophrenia, Trans Character, multiple systems
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-29
Updated: 2017-07-29
Packaged: 2018-12-08 10:45:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,417
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11644962
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ymirjotunn/pseuds/ymirjotunn
Summary: hinata... well. hinata still exists. it's weird and nice, getting used to that, and it's even better when there's someone else there to talk to.





	chiaroscuro

**Author's Note:**

> warnings for surreality, discussion of earth-shatteringly mind-numbing boredom & its effects, and a very brief mention of disordered eating
> 
> once again might i remind you that everyone in dr is schizophrenic and it's great.

Hinata wakes up in darkness, darkness so deep and complete it might as well be blinding.

 

It takes him a moment to realize that he hasn’t woken up at all, that he’s still...well, he’s not asleep, but he’s not in the Program, either, in some strange stasis between the two.

 

Memories start trickling in, information streaming into himself like a river, information from the Program and what happened and what might happen now, and his body is alight, suddenly, a faint glow getting stronger steadily. He’s bright. Bright like he was when he stopped the loop.

 

Hinata looks at his arms, touches his skin, feeling the way it’s hot and cool all at once, and his body looks right in a way it didn’t used to. He doesn’t think he’s wearing a binder, for one.

 

He feels right. He feels at ease, strong in a way he doesn’t really remember feeling. He doesn’t remember a lot. Maybe because he’s, well, he’s mostly program, or the results of one, but that’s fine. He’s himself, in a way, and he knows what that means, and what it could mean, and that’s more than fine. 

 

Good, really. The light of him flares with the thought.

 

“Turn that down.”

 

The voice is his own, but he hasn’t spoken, and besides that it’s flat, heavy in a way Hinata doesn’t feel. So…

 

“Hey,” he says.

 

“You’re giving me a headache.” The voice is coming from the darkness, and Hinata had been preoccupied with himself so he hadn’t really looked at it properly but now that he does he sees it’s just a...a void, a spiraling blurry-edged mass of blackness, of nothingness. Not even Hinata’s light is capable of touching it, it seems, like the darkness is just swallowing whatever touches it.

 

“Oh,” Hinata says, looking down at himself again. He is kind of bright, and if this was all there was before, it makes sense that it’s overwhelming for Kamukura. “Sorry. Are you in there?”

 

“I  _ am  _ there,” Kamukura says, voice dripping with not disdain but some kind of disbelief that Hinata doesn’t already know what that means.

 

Hinata is focusing on his glow, trying to calm it down, and when he thinks about what he must look like, thinks about how a headache feels because goodness knows he’s  _ very _ aware of what they feel like, thinks about how it feels to make that throbbing ache behind his eyes quieter, the glow fades, to something maybe a little more manageable, dulls it to something more blue, less abrasive.

 

He looks up, into the dark. There is nothing. It  _ is _ nothing, he realizes, is the right answer, that it’s nothingness and that the nothingness is everything here.

 

“This is you?” he asks.

 

“No.” Kamukura sounds...bored. That makes sense, Hinata thinks. That was the issue, right?

 

“Ah,” he says, realizing. “It’s...me?”

 

“It’s us.” There’s darkness coiling around the edges of Hinata’s feet, lapping at the light there, but the gentled glow isn’t being swallowed.

 

Hinata sits down, sudden, and the darkest parts of the shadows pull back like they’ve been burned. “Sorry,” he says. “Is this hurting you? I just wanted to sit.” He’s not even sure what he’s sitting on. It’s not really an environment, in here, just the void and his body like a lantern.

 

“Mm.” It’s not really an answer.

 

“I’d like to see you,” he says. “Meet you properly.”

 

The void laughs, short and sharp. “There is nothing to see.”

 

“There’s everything to see,” Hinata says. “I know that. I don’t know you, really, but I know enough to know you aren’t nothing.”

 

“You don’t know me.” The darkness coils closer to him again.

 

“You’re me, right? Us? So I know you a little.” Hinata reaches out to the dark, the silky waves of it, runs a hand along it. It’s like there’s just nothing to light up, the way the color, the light, just stops, and Hinata’s pretty sure that’s not how perception and sight works but he’s also pretty sure that it doesn’t matter, when you’re in your own head.

 

“What do you think you know?” The voice is so acidic that Hinata almosts expects the shadows to burn to the touch, but they don’t, just rippling under his hands and around his crossed legs, nearly agitated.

 

“You’re tired.” Hinata cups his hand and the darkness flows into it, like it’s not thinking about what it’s doing, and then retreats again. “And you don’t want to be.”

 

“There are a lot of things I don’t want to be, Hinata-san.”

 

“There’s no need to be so formal,” Hinata says, smiling down at the shadows. “We’re the same, right?”

 

Silence, and then. “You are not the same as me.”

 

“No?”

 

“You don’t know what this is like.”

 

Hinata thinks about it. “No. Maybe not, precisely. I think I get it a little, though.”

 

“How could you know?” It sounds like Kamukura’s voice is closer, somehow, even though nothing about the environment has really changed. “How could you  _ possibly _ know?”

 

Hinata pushes both of his hands into the shadow, lets them sink into it, thinks about pouring milk into water, the way it diffuses, billows out into clouds of white.

 

He thinks about what it feels like to be so tired he can’t move, so tired he feels like he must be physically melting, so tired he can’t speak, so tired his bones are splitting at the seams. He thinks about frustration, and what it feels like to let something burst inside of himself, and he thinks about what it would be like to live the same thing for the rest of forever, thinks about boredom, thinks about nothingness, thinks about lying down and letting everything just wash over him and waiting until it stops even though it never will.

 

He thinks about what it feels like to die, what it feels like to be dead, what it feels like to be darkness and to be swallowed by darkness, to be swallowed by yourself. He thinks about what it feels like to be eternal and everything and infinite and what it feels like to be absolutely nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing at all.

 

And he thinks about what it feels like to be light, in both senses of the word: a brightness and a weight lifted. He thinks about laughter, and he thinks about what it looks like when someone smiles, or what it feels like when he smiles. He thinks about what it feels like to step out of the shower after it’s felt really nice on his skin, and what it feels like to be a little more awake than usual, and what it feels like to solve a puzzle. He thinks about what it feels like to talk to someone when you don’t know them very well, what it feels like to be surprised, what it feels like to be wrong, what it feels like to explore.

 

He thinks about Nanami, about choosing not to choose, about Komaeda, about choosing to choose, about his friends, about the future.

 

“Oh,” Kamukura says.

 

They’re sitting across from Hinata now, cross-legged, wearing a dark suit, eyes deep and red in the shadow of hair as dark as the shadow that they were before, long and puddled around them on the ground.

 

Oh! There’s a ground now. That’s kind of neat. And walls, kind of, dulled so it’s not hard to look at them but definitely there.

 

“I tried to share,” Hinata says. His hands are back now, folded in his lap. “Did it work?”

 

He knows it did, because he could feel Kamukura sharing, too, although maybe they didn’t mean to. And he feels Kamukura, too, mixed up in him, alongside him, like how once you stir the milk into water it’s just kind of like that, then, not something you can separate, not something you can pull apart.

 

It’s...nice. Familiar. Cozy.

 

“You want to get them out,” Kamukura says.

 

“I want to get us out, too,” Hinata says, smiles at them.

 

Kamukura lifts their head a little, exposing the pale skin of their neck, blinks at Hinata. “You really think you can do that.” It’s not a question, not annoyance or contempt, just a statement, not quite uncertain but close to it.

 

“I do,” he says. He’s sincere. He’s not sure he knows another way to be. “I really do.”

 

Kamukura looks like they’re trying to process this, although Hinata can feel they already have. They’re really just trying to think of some way to respond, because--well, what is there to say? And how could it possibly be said?

 

It’s okay, though. Hinata feels it.

 

And Kamukura feels  _ that _ , that Hinata feels it, and the shape of them relaxes, leaning back on their hands and examining Hinata’s form. “You’re unexpected.”

 

Hinata’s glow flares again, joyful, proud. Agreeing. “Yeah.”

 

“I was trying to figure out what to do,” Kamukura says. The exposition isn’t really necessary, but they seem to want to speak, and Hinata wants to hear them. “To decide if hope or despair would be less boring.”

 

“And,” Hinata says, and his chest in particular is glowing, his heart, his ribs, hot with excitement because he knows what Kamukura is thinking, what they’re going to say--

 

“And we don’t have to decide,” Kamukura says. 

 

Their head is tilted, face a strange expression that they don’t remember having felt before. They can’t place it, and Hinata isn’t sure he can, either. It’s not really an emotion so much as it’s--well, it’s  _ emotion _ , is what it is.

 

“Will you come with me?” Hinata asks.

 

He reaches out, hand alight, nearly aflame, and Kamukura’s hand, pale and cold and soft, meets his halfway, grips and pulls and their expression has gone from unreadably-something to defiant and excited and something like victory and

  
  


 

and they open their eyes, and push at the lid of their stasis pod, and it opens to a roomful of the things, a place Kamukura remembers but Hinata doesn’t but it doesn’t matter because they’re both here, they’re the same and different and uncertain and absolute all at once and they take a deep breath and they think they might be alive.

 

“I want to cut my hair,” Hinata says, with their voice, a little flat and a little higher than he’d like. And they need a binder, or a sports bra, or something. Outside the headspace their body is still mostly Kamukura’s and it’s kind of uncomfortable.

 

Kamukura doesn’t really respond, and Hinata taps their leg, thinking as they wander outside the room, along the hallways, looking for somewhere that will have scissors.

 

“Okay,” he says, and compromises. “Right above the shoulders? I like ponytails.” Kamukura likes that, too. Hinata thinks they could talk if they felt like it, or maybe they’re already talking, maybe it’s the same thing, but with no one else awake it doesn’t really matter how weird their head is, or who precisely is talking, and they don’t ever have to figure out who they are if they don’t feel like it.

 

The future is theirs and maybe in the future whatever this is can be just normal.

 

Kamukura cuts their hair because their hand is steadier when they have it than when Hinata does, because Hinata’s always been kind of shaky, kind of unsteady, but they don’t cut their hair like they could. They don’t bother with a mirror and they cut it uneven on purpose, want to look like a mess.

 

They both do, really, want to look like someone who’s alive just because they feel like it, and they do, when they pull their hair back and tie it up and look in a mirror to see if it worked.

 

In the mirror their eyes are like their head, different but familiar and mostly right, and their hair looks good like this, dark and choppy and crappy. They definitely aren’t Hinata and they definitely aren’t Kamukura but they’re definitely someone they like.

 

“Okay,” they say, aloud, and he’s starting to settle into this voice and this body and the way it feels to swap the steering wheel or just share it. “Ready?” It’s not a question he has to ask, because their head is already answering it, but it still feels nice to speak aloud, feels confident.

 

Kamukura taps their thigh, reassuringly, a steady beat as they walk back to the controls room.

 

They have some work to do. It’s easy, weirdly easy, because Hinata’s not used to everything Kamukura has, the deftness with which they type and the certainty of their code.

 

They write an AI for the data retrieval of their friends, and Hinata reminds them when to eat. They take naps when they’re tired and when they dream they’re in their headspace again, both of them, one bright body and one dark body in a kind of visceral harmony. Hinata tells Kamukura stories about the Program to make the memories clearer and Kamukura infodumps about whatever they happen to think about and it’s comfortable, really genuinely comfortable in a way that’s new to them both.

 

It only takes about four days before they’re ready. They argue over logistics and efficiency and Hinata starts to figure out what he’s doing and so does Kamukura and on the fifth day they do the first dive: hook their body up to the console and let their eyes drift shut.

 

Akane’s sitting on the beach, burying her own feet in the sand, and when they approach her she jolts, spilling her sand pile everywhere in her shock. “Hinata-kun?”

 

They smile, and reach out a hand to help her up. “Something like that, yes. Are you ready to come back?”

 

She laughs, disbelieving and delighted, and lets them help pull her to her feet. “You serious? I’ve been waiting! Are we gonna get the others?”

 

“Not yet,” Hinata says, apologetic. “We’re trying to take it slow.”

 

“We, huh?” She squints at him. When something clicks in her eyes, Hinata waits for her to ask all the questions he’s thought about, but they don’t come. She just grins, wider than they thought possible, and claps her hands. “Okay! Sounds like a plan.”

 

Hinata smiles back at her, and so does Kamukura, a little, and they hold out a hand and she takes it and they save her file, and that’s just the beginning. They’re all just a beginning.

 

The future isn’t quite bright, but it’s comfortable to look at.

**Author's Note:**

> to clarify:  
> my hinata is a nonbinary-ish dude, he/him. kamu is a notgenderthing, they/them or sometimes it/its (i'll be writing more about that later).
> 
> to clarify another thing:  
> dr3 made it pretty clear that hinata and kamukura are essentially a multiple system now, which is awesome and ideal and i'm taking that and running with it. hinatzuru is mine now fuckers hahaha
> 
> this one isn't actually hinata's field trip with kamukura because hinata's field trip with kamukura is their entire life, but it counts anyways. hope yall enjoyed!


End file.
